


Only Twenty-Three

by xo_thefirst



Series: City Street Lights [3]
Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Angst, Comfort Sex, Doctors!AU, M/M, Medical Jargon, Minor Character Death, but baeksoo still love each other so
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-04
Updated: 2017-02-04
Packaged: 2018-09-21 20:54:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9566000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xo_thefirst/pseuds/xo_thefirst
Summary: He can handle death, has seen plenty of it in his profession, but there’s still that occasional one where it rips him from the inside out.





	

**Author's Note:**

> this happened. this stuff is real. i’m sorry for bringing down the mood ;; but it’s also my birthday (feb. 4), so i’ll probably make up for this with some fluffy stuff later on cries (yeah, barely beta’d)
> 
> oh, yes. jongin is an ob/gyn physician. joohyun and sehun are emergency room nurses. code blue means cardiac/full arrest.

Baekhyun’s in the middle of typing in orders when he first hears it. The voice overhead is muffled at first, as if the operator was sleeping before she was called, and he stops what he’s doing to listen to her. She repeats herself three times, the same message of “code blue, room three-four-four,” and he immediately clicks _send_ on his screen to get basic lab work and radiology started on the most recent patient he’s seen.

At this time, at two in the morning, he’s the only doctor working in the ER. He’s doing his mandatory rotation of night shifts–it’s really not all that different from other shifts, except quieter–and he gets up from his chair and stretches. “Where’s 344?” he asks, looking around for the charge nurse. He grabs his stethoscope off of the desk and loops it around his shoulders. There aren’t that many nurses in the station. “Hey,” he calls out to a tech pushing the EKG machine around. “Where’s Joohyun?”

“She’s already there” is the answer he receives before Sehun walks into the station next.

“Sehun,” Baekhyun calls, even if he’s already walking off in the opposite direction of where he assumes the room is. “Where’s the code? 344.”

“344?” Sehun repeats, brows furrowing in thought before his eyes widen. “That’s post-partum. Do you know where that is?”

Baekhyun curses, heart stopping for a second before it reboots in overdrive, “No. Show me.”

 

Within minutes, they’re arriving to the other side of the hospital, taking the elevator to get to the third floor only accessible by badge. They walk through several corridors before being pointed to the direction of the room with the blinking red light outside the door.

There are hushed voices and loud demands and Baekhyun fights his way through the team of respiratory therapists, ICU and floor nurses, to see Joohyun is already leading the team in trying to revive the patient back to life. But when Baekhyun first lands eyes on her, the young woman on the bed, he feels his heart seize in his chest. “Shit, how old?” he demands, looking around for the primary nurse.

“Twenty-three.”

“Fuck,” Baekhyun hisses, before he’s moving to the top of the bed, removing his jacket and stethoscope and tossing it onto a table in the room. “Get me an 8.0 tube. Let’s intubate.”

Joohyun is a blessing as she gets what he normally uses for procedures like these. Within minutes, the tube is down the patient’s throat but she’s still pulseless. “Continue compressions,” he orders, moving out of the way so the respiratory therapists can monitor her manipulated breaths by pumping the bag. He searches around again for that same primary nurse and sees a couple floor nurses just standing around, staring. “What’s her history?”

“She only had a tubal ligation one week ago,” someone answers, causing more red flags to appear in his head. “She was a transfer from Gyeonggi for sepsis. She had a small abscess but it didn’t look like anything serious.”

Suddenly, the nurse practitioner who helped first admit the patient walks into the room, eyes already rimmed red and looking like she hasn’t slept in days. “She had a small subcutaneous abscess after having a tubal ligation last week. It wasn’t anything severe but she started having fevers two days ago. I asked the husband if she was short of breath or complained of it and he said it looked like she was a little short of breath recently.”

“Shit,” Baekhyun says in response, listening as the nurses follow protocol and continue giving medications to try and revive her. The compressions don’t stop.

“Oh, Dr. Kim,” someone calls and Baekhyun looks up to see Jongin standing there, in his scrubs and a NorthFace vest with a stethoscope resting around his neck, staring at the patient. He’s on-call today.

“What happened?” Jongin demands, meeting Baekhyun’s gaze briefly and giving him a nod in greeting.

The story is repeated a couple more times and Baekhyun continues to watch the monitor the patient is hooked up to. There are heartbeats, but none made from her own body, and there is no medical history on her. She’s not diabetic, didn’t have any type of blood pressure or cholesterol issues. She doesn’t have any cardiac history. There are only so few options as to why she coded when she had recent surgery.

“When did she have her baby?” Jongin asks next, lifting up the patient’s gown to stare at the healing scar from the recent surgery.

“She didn’t have a baby. She only had a tubal ligation.”

Frowning at the response, Baekhyun walks over to where Jongin is standing and stares at the scar. It’s too large to be from a simple tubal ligation. “Where’s her chart?” Jongin says next, looking around for that same primary nurse. “She had a C-section. When did she have her baby? Was it here?”

“I– I don’t know.”

The chart is handed to him as he puts on his glasses and Baekhyun looks over to the house supervisor, the one in charge of all admits and taking notes during codes. “How long have we been coding her?”

“Since 2:13 am.”

Looking over to the clock on the wall, it’s been thirty minutes already, ten minutes after he should’ve called it. “She probably has a PE,” he murmurs, loud enough for Jongin to hear next to him. “With her recent surgery and no history, there’s a great chance that’s what it could be.”

“She recently had a C-section birth two weeks ago, tubal ligation one week ago,” Jongin answers in response. “Lee did the surgery both times.”

Baekhyun’s heart clenches. “We could give her tPA, but her surgeries have been within a month.”

“What could that do?”

Baekhyun knows Jongin knows that medicine–tPA–is used for strokes, to break up clots in the brain, but this situation is tricky. “If we give her tPA and she has a PE, it could break up that clot in her lungs. The downside to that is that if she comes back, she’ll have to go to the operating room and she’ll bleed out internally through her stomach because she just had surgery within a month.” Next to him, Jongin frowns as he stares at the surgical site again. “She’s going to bleed out and die. What do you want to do, Jongin?”

It takes a long moment, where Jongin stares at the patient, but Baekhyun’s already made his decision.

“She’s only twenty-three, Jongin. That’s the only reason why I’m going to give it. If it doesn’t work, I’ll call it.”

Within seconds, Jongin agrees. The medicine is ordered from pharmacy STAT and they wait as Joohyun pushes in ten milliliters of the medicine when it arrives. “Stop compressions,” Baekhyun orders, as they all watch and wait. Another few seconds pass by. “Continue. One more amp of bicarb and epi and then I’m calling it.”

“The husband is in the hallway,” the nurse practitioner informs, before looking to Baekhyun, looking like she’s about to cry again. “He’s been here with her all night. I’ll wait for you to go talk to him.”

“It sucks,” Baekhyun admits, as they all wait, watching as all the medication goes into her system, hoping to bring her back, but she’s pale. “Because she has a newborn at home.”

“She’s only twenty-three,” Jongin murmurs in response, and he sounds as broken as Baekhyun feels. Not very many doctors care about their patients as much as they do, nowadays.

 

“Joohyun,” Baekhyun calls, right when he steps into the nurses’ station in the ER. “Cigarette.”

Joohyun gives him a half-hearted smile. “Yeah.”

 

Kyungsoo is already gone by the time Baekhyun manages to get home. It’s like he’s on autopilot, grabbing a granola bar to snack on and stripping himself of his scrubs, before he’s getting in the shower to rid the extra germs from his body, the extra smoke, because he doesn’t normally smoke. He doesn’t normally give himself into cancer, but it couldn’t be helped. It was a tough night. He doesn’t even realize he’s in bed until he’s sleeping away the morning and afternoon.

When he wakes, it’s to hear the front door opening. He blinks up at the ceiling, clearing his vision, before he realizes it’s Kyungsoo walking into their room. “Hey,” Kyungsoo greets. It was a normal workday for him, from eight to five, and Baekhyun’s heart aches when he sees him. He looks so well rested. Alive. “How was last night? You’re still in bed.”

All Baekhyun does is shake his head before Kyungsoo is frowning and heading towards the bathroom instead. He can hear the shower turning on but then the rest becomes a blur. He lies there, staring at the ceiling, until he feels the bed dip and Kyungsoo is leaning over him instead, clothes on but hair still damp. There aren’t very many words spoken and Baekhyun cries out his frustrations when Kyungsoo leans in and kisses him like he’s his entire world. He can handle death, has seen plenty of it in his profession, but there’s still that occasional one where it rips him from the inside out.

So, he clings onto him, arms tight around Kyungsoo’s shoulders, and he lets him take him apart thread by thread. He gasps when Kyungsoo moves away to kiss down his neck, when he reaches over for the lube and tosses a condom packet onto the bed. He opens up easily to him, legs spreading to accommodate his weight, and he whines when he feels Kyungsoo trace his rim with one finger before pushing in slowly. It’s a welcome pressure and Baekhyun simply _breathes_.

One finger turns into two and then three and Baekhyun kisses Kyungsoo until he gets the message, rolls the condom down his cock, and slowly pushes into him next. Their movements are slow and steady, with long, deep thrusts, and Baekhyun gasps as Kyungsoo nips at his bottom lip, causes bruises in the shape of his fingers on his hip as his other hand fists the sheets next to his head. He gets lost in Kyungsoo and, honestly, there’s no better way to get lost in life.

When he comes, it’s to Kyungsoo stroking him in time with his thrusts. He’s speechless this time, mouth falling into a silent moan as Kyungsoo bites into his shoulder, comes when Baekhyun involuntarily clenches around him in waves. There’s a barely audible grunt and Baekhyun can’t resist running his hands up and down Kyungsoo’s back, holds and soothes him, as he comes back down from his high. He clings on tight after Kyungsoo pulls out, removes the condom and trashes it, because he loves Kyungsoo and he wonders if he even says it enough.

It takes several minutes before either of them speak, Kyungsoo content to let Baekhyun lay on top of him and listen to his heart, but Kyungsoo is the one to break it, concerned about the dry tear tracks on Baekhyun’s cheeks. He doesn’t cry often. “What happened?”

“The last time I went to post-partum for a code blue,” Baekhyun says, trails off, voice sounding as broken as he feels. Kyungsoo stiffens under him, knows whom he couldn’t save, their friend from years ago, before he’s quick to run fingers through his hair and bring him in for another gentle kiss. “She was only twenty-three.”


End file.
